Abstract: Developing a people-centered society and improving social governance,are key to building China into a modernized country with socialist characteristics. This paper aims to reveal the effectiveness of public participation in social governance, takes the ecological water conservancy project as background, and sets a research framework that focuses on three participants: the government, enterprises and the public. Firstly, this paper analyzes the behavior and motivation of each participant from the perspective of game theory among government, enterprises and the public. Secondly, through the Nash equilibrium analysis of the three parties, this paper explores the reasons for the lack of effectiveness of public participation, and puts forward strategies and paths for improvement. At last, this paper verifies the proposed theory using two actual ecological water conservancy project cases.

Key words: public participation, ecological water conservancy projects, Nash equilibrium, social governance